Xilinx FPGA

I am using Digilent NEXYS A7 FPGA learning board. It uses a Xilinx Artix®-7 FPGA. Xilinx is now under AMD.

FPGA	XC7A100T-1CSG324C
Logic Slices	15850 ( 1 Logic Slices = 4 Logic cell)
6-inputs Look-Up Table (LUT)	1188
Shift Register [Kb]	594
Flip-Flops	126800
Block RAM [kBit]	4860
Memory	DDR 128 [MiB] (ISSI, IS43/46DR16640C)

AMD Vivado Design Suite

AMD Vivado Design Suite is a software tool used to design and develop hardware circuitry for programmable devices like Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and System-on- a-Chip (SoC) made by AMD.

require libraries

sudo apt install libtinfo-dev libtinfo.so.6 libncurses.so.6

the suite actually needs libtinfo5 and ncurses5. but we can cheat it by creating symbolic links

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtinfo.so.6 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtinfo.so.5
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libncurses.so.6 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libncurses.so.5

install the Cable Driver

In Linux, the driver needs to be manually install.

go to the Vivado install directory

cd <Vivado Install>/data/xicom/cable_drivers/lin64/install_script/install_drivers/
./install_drivers

Run

my installation is

>cd /tools/Xilinx/Vivado/2024.1
>source settings64.sh 
>vivado

A simple program

A youtube video 5 - End-to-End FPGA Project on the Nexys A7 by Anas Salah Eddin is very good introduction.

Reset the board

Press the PROG red button